0 miles / -282 feet elevation 10:00 a.m. I had finished second the year before. Coming back, I had trained so hard, and then learning that Scott Jurek was there definitely changed my headspace. I felt that Scott was going to crush the field from the get-go. He's that good.

17 miles / -165 feet / 12:28 p.m. The surface temperature of the road is around 200 degrees. You have to run on the white line on the road or your shoes start to kind of melt -- they actually get soft. Around the thirty-five-mile mark I came around a corner and I could see Scott up ahead, so I knew he must be slowing down, because I wasn't going any faster.

42 miles / 0 feet / 4:16 p.m. The only good thing about a seventeen-mile, five-thousand-foot climb is that for every thousand feet you gain in elevation, the temperature drops five and a half degrees. It felt like it got down to maybe 110. That makes a difference.

59 miles / 4,956 feet I was craving not having to climb anymore. But after two miles of going downhill, I wished I wasn't running downhill anymore. Scott had bounced back, and he went by me like he was shot out of a cannon. He yelled, "Hey, free speed, Ferg," meaning running downhill with gravity. I turned to the guy pacing me and said, "Nothing fucking free here, pal."

72 miles / 1,970 feet / 10:33 p.m. I was thinking, There is a possibility that I can win this race. That's pretty exciting at the halfway point. At the eighty-five-mile mark, the other runner in the top three, Mike Sweeney, could barely string a sentence together. The medical team there diagnosed him with pulmonary edema, which is what high-altitude mountain climbers get when their lungs basically fill up with fluid. You can drown on the fluid that's piling into your lungs.

It was probably down to 80 degrees, which felt cold. I got reports that Jurek was coming on strong.

90 miles / 5,050 feet / 2:32 a.m. Underneath a big callus that had formed on the bottom of my foot from training, the flesh was starting to tear away, and I was getting a blister about the size of a baseball. I put my foot up and my nurse started rooting around with a hypodermic needle, trying to find this layer of thick skin. But that was hurting more than the blister, so I said, "Let it go." And I carried on.

I was losing toenails, too, just from all of the pounding on the road. They would swell and loosen and then pop. They'd still remain on my foot, but they were raised up by about a quarter inch of fluid. I ended up losing eight nails. So that was starting to be a bit of an issue. Just past the hundred-mile mark, you can see Mount Whitney. It looks like it's about two states over. And you see this ugly "Z" going up the side of the mountain -- that's the road you have to run up. You run toward it for an hour and a half, and it doesn't seem to be getting any closer. Every cell in your body is telling you to stop. It was like I was on this big hideous treadmill.

122 miles / 3,610 feet / 8:57 a.m. Blood was starting to flow through my shoes. I still hadn't ruled out winning the race. I was still charging as hard as I could. But I was bent over -- I looked like Groucho Marx going up that hill.

135 miles / 8,360 feet / 12:33 p.m. The first thing I did when I finished was drink an ice-cold Molson Canadian. That's what I was thinking about the last twenty miles or so. Absolutely I wanted to win, but finishing second to a guy like Scott Jurek, I was okay with that. I don't think I could have gone five minutes faster. And I was thrilled to knock an hour off my previous time. Badwater is about a lot more than who finished first and who finished second.
–As told to Matt Finkelstein